The Fascinating Story of How Delia Derbyshire Created the Original Doctor Who Theme

We’ve focused a fair bit here on the work of Delia Der­byshire, pio­neer­ing elec­tron­ic com­pos­er of the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry—fea­tur­ing two doc­u­men­taries on her and dis­cussing her role in almost cre­at­ing an elec­tron­ic back­ing track for Paul McCartney’s “Yes­ter­day.” There’s good rea­son to devote so much atten­tion to her: Derbyshire’s work with the BBC’s Radio­phon­ic Work­shop laid the bedrock for a good deal of the sound design we hear on TV and radio today.

And, as we point­ed out pre­vi­ous­ly, her elec­tron­ic music, record­ed under her own name and with the band White Noise, influ­enced “most every cur­rent leg­end in the business—from Aphex Twin and the Chem­i­cal Broth­ers to Paul Hart­noll of Orbital.” Along with doc­u­men­taries and high praise in the music press, the late Der­byshire now has her own Exhi­bi­tion at the Coven­try Music Muse­um, as of Decem­ber 6 of last year.

Yet for all her influ­ence among dance music com­posers and sound effects wiz­ards, Der­byshire and her music remain pret­ty obscure—that is except for one com­po­si­tion, instant­ly rec­og­niz­able as the orig­i­nal theme to the BBC’s sci-fit hit Doc­tor Who (hear it at the top), “the best-known work of a rag­tag group of tech­ni­cians,” writes The Atlantic, “who unwit­ting­ly helped shape the course of 20th-cen­tu­ry music.” Writ­ten by com­pos­er Ron Granier, the song was actu­al­ly brought into being by the Radio­phon­ic Work­shop, and by Der­byshire espe­cial­ly. The sto­ry of the Doc­tor Who theme’s cre­ation is almost as inter­est­ing as the tune itself, with its “swoop­ing, hiss­ing and puls­ing” that “man­ages to be at once haunt­ing, goofy and ethe­re­al.” Just above, you can see Der­byshire and her assis­tant Dick Mills tell it in brief.

What we learn from them is fas­ci­nat­ing, con­sid­er­ing that com­po­si­tions like this are now cre­at­ed in pow­er­ful com­put­er sys­tems with dozens of sep­a­rate tracks and dig­i­tal effects. The Doc­tor Who theme, on the oth­er hand, record­ed in 1963, was made even before basic ana­log syn­the­siz­ers came into use. “There are no musi­cians,” says Mills, “there are no syn­the­siz­ers, and in those days, we didn’t even have a 2‑track or a stereo machine, it was always mono.” (Despite pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tions, the theme does not fea­ture a Theremin.) Der­byshire con­firms; each and every part of the song “was con­struct­ed on quar­ter-inch mono tape,” she says, “inch by inch by inch,” using such record­ing tech­niques as “fil­tered white noise” and some­thing called a “wob­bu­la­tor.” How were all of these painstak­ing­ly con­struct­ed indi­vid­ual parts com­bined with­out mul­ti track tech­nol­o­gy? “We cre­at­ed three sep­a­rate tapes,” Der­byshire explains, “put them onto three machines and stood next to them and said “Ready, steady, go!” and pushed all the ‘start’ but­tons at once. It seemed to work.”

The theme came about when Grain­er received a com­mis­sion from the BBC after his well-received work on oth­er series. He “com­posed the theme on a sin­gle sheet of A4 man­u­script,” writes Mark Ayres in an exten­sive online his­to­ry, “and sent it over from his home in Por­tu­gal, leav­ing the Work­shop to get on with it.” Aware that the musique con­crète tech­niques Der­byshire and her team used “were very time-con­sum­ing, Grain­er pro­vid­ed a very sim­ple com­po­si­tion, in essence just the famous bass line and a swoop­ing melody,” as well as vague­ly evoca­tive instruc­tions for orches­tra­tion like “wind bub­ble” and “cloud.” Ayres writes, “To an inven­tive radio­phon­ic com­pos­er such as Delia Der­byshire, this was a gift.” Indeed “upon hear­ing it,” The Atlantic notes, “a very impressed Grain­er bare­ly rec­og­nized it as his com­po­si­tion. Due to BBC poli­cies at the time, Granier—against his objections—is still offi­cial­ly cred­it­ed as the sole writer.” But the cred­it for this futur­is­tic work—which sounds absolute­ly like noth­ing else of the time and “which brought to a wide audi­ence meth­ods once exclu­sive to the high mod­ernism of exper­i­men­tal composition”—should equal­ly go to Der­byshire and her team. You can con­trast that ahead-of-its-time orig­i­nal theme with all of the iter­a­tions to fol­low in the video just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938- 2014)

Two Doc­u­men­taries Intro­duce Delia Der­byshire, the Pio­neer in Elec­tron­ic Music

Meet Delia Der­byshire, the Dr. Who Com­pos­er Who Almost Turned The Bea­t­les’ “Yes­ter­day” Into Ear­ly Elec­tron­i­ca

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness